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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Under the Fedora: Meanwhile

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Ted Cruz Obamacare debate but while that has been the headline there are a lot of things going on that deserve more attention. Such as Babalu Blog post on the murder of Lara Jones:

It makes the dictatorship look good, and more importantly, it helps drive tourism to the island. Tourists like Lara Jones, a British teacher who thought she was vacationing on the Castro regime's highly touted low-crime island. Instead, this young lady ended up murdered in her Cuban hotel room, and it took the press more than a year to finally report this heinous crime.

However there is a movie out about Cuba Una Noche Jay Nordlinger had this to say about it.

In Una Noche, life in Cuba is depicted as nasty, grim, and hopeless. Is it even worse than depicted? Oh, sure, for a great many. I am reminded of The Lives of Others, that masterpiece of a movie, which appeared in 2006. It is about East Germany and the Stasi. When I wrote about the movie, I heard from former East Germans who said, “Life in our country was worse — a lot worse — than what that movie portrays.” I mentioned this to the maker of the film, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He said essentially this: “They’re right. But good luck finding a movie that’s closer to the reality.”

And asks this question:

After the Castros fall, will the media and our cultural elites at large speak honestly about Communist Cuba? Will they speak about Cuba the way our ESPN writer spoke about East Germany? I doubt it. They have too much invested in the myths about Cuba: the glories of its health care, literacy, and racial enlightenment.

I think within a few years after the Castro government falls the media will be like France in 1948 where everyone claimed to be part of the resistance.

Robert Stacy McCain brings to our attention a piece on what is and what is not acceptable to say these days:

The point is that everyone has boundaries and communicating these to colleagues through behaviour is key to avoiding unnecessary offence.
It is also important to ensure that when a women is subject to treatment that falls outside her boundaries she can identify that and decide how to address it and move on.
If you do not define your own boundaries then you cannot expect others to be able to either.

There was a time when such advice would have been considered simple common sense, but in our more “enlightened” age it’s a cause for conflict and feminist blogger Katie Halper objected strongly..

Vanessa James is a successful lawyer — and that’s a bad thing, says Katie Halper, who writes for a feminist blog.

This is the difference between pragmatism and ideology: Do you want to solve your problem, or do you want to construe every problem to fit political categories and intellectual abstractions?

Feminism is a totalitarian ideology that acknowledges no limits to its ambitions. Men who seek to negotiate a compromise with feminism are like Neville Chamberlain, supposing he could have peace by handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler.

You can’t negotiate with feminism, you can either fight it or concede to it.

One of the more significant stories of the week has been the slaughter in Kenya by Al Qaeda related groups that specifically targeted non-Muslims. There has been plenty written about that violence, but not as much about the American angle to the story that the tavern Keepers blog has noted:

The Abubakar as-Saddique mosque in Minneapolis has recently been taking actions to combat al-Shabab recruiting of their members. However, this is only coming after they distanced themselves from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali-American community leader in Minneapolis, states that while the mosque was affiliated with CAIR it was a center for recruitment by Islamist terrorists.

“All of our kids were going there for years. That’s where indoctrination happened.”

“[The al-Shabaab recruiters] become the father they never had. They engage them. And the way they engage them, is — these angry young men who are left on the street, it’s like, ‘[Americans] don’t like you. They hate you. So we’ll love you.’ In the end, they end up being brainwashed.”

When Mr. Bihi brought the terror recruiting activities to the public, CAIR responded by calling him an Islamophobe, the standard title attached to anyone who dares tell the truth about the actions of Muslim Brotherhood groups and other Islamist factions. There are a lot of Somali refugees that were resettled by the State Department in Minneapolis as the government of Somalia fell to Islamist warlords. While this humanitarian move is to be lauded, problems arose when the community did not assimilate and spread out as new Americans. Instead, they stayed insulated and a perfect target for radicalization and brainwashing by terrorists. According to a Washington Post 2011 profile of Bihi, at least 25 young men disappeared from Minneapolis to fight for Al-Shabab and dozens of others were being investigated for recruiting or fundraising for the terror group.

Atlas Shrugs has been all over stuff like this, but the rest of the media has continued to ignore those facts. Meanwhile PJ media has noted another fact concerning Kenya that has not been convenient to this media.

Reports from Kenya indicate that security wasn’t allowed to carry firearms in the upscale mall where the massacre occurred. At the end of the day, this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free zone.” It would seem that someone forgot to tell the terrorists that weapons were not allowed. Knowing terrorists, I’m sure if they had known about the restriction they would have dutifully complied. Still, there is that chance that some terrorists are not the most upstanding, law-abiding folks in any given neighborhood. Perhaps the better part of valor is making sure that “the gun free” zone goes the way of the dinosaur. We all may be a lot safer.

When I see this kind of talk from our friends on the left on gun free zones making people safe. My mind goes to a quote from Sheldon Cooper and the big Bang Theory:

And I'm sure some fool in the Donner party said the snow would stop any day now. I like to think they ate him first.

I can’t wait for the show to come back new this week.

Lee Stranahan is in Beirut reporting on Christians plight from the Syrian civil war and is breaking news:

In an exclusive interview with independent American journalist Lee Stranahan, Syrian refugees say the attack on the predominantly Christian village of Maaloula was aided by Muslims living in the town. The revelation that their neighbors were joining with the Syrian rebel jihadists to terrorize Christians in the small village about 45 minutes north of Damacscus came as a shock to them.

Anyone who hits bloggers as not real reporters should take a good look at the work Lee is doing right now.

I recently saw the movie The Family staring Robert Di Nero , Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones. It’s a comedy but a dark one with a fair amount of violence and no cleaning up of what organized crime is.

I’ve always found it interesting that the diversity police don’t have a problem with the portrait of Sicilians as a bunch of gangsters. Of course they (or I should say we) are White Europeans so there is no objection to any such thing. Of course I and most Italian Americans could care less.

The Patriots are 3-0 and we’ve heard every week about how poorly they have been playing, Tom Brady has been particularly hard on himself. Yet the team has yet to lose a game.

That’s how good the Patriots have been in the Brady Era, so great that when they are playing bad they start 3-0.

The Boston Red Sox are finishing strong, they’ve clinched the AL east and are fighting with Oakland for the best record in baseball. At the same time with five games to go there are 3 teams (5 mathematically) fighting for those two wild card spots. The Houston Astros are not one of them. With 4 games left they have lost 107 games. They have lost 11 games in a row and can realistically expect to finish with 110 losses.

And if they do so they will still finish a full 10 games ahead of the 1962 New York Mets.

Finally this weekend the 9th Doctor Special is coming up on BBC America, we have finally reached the modern era of the series. Christopher Eccleston only played the Doctor for one year and while David Tennant followed him admirably I’ve always if given another couple of years he might have proved to be one of the best Doctor’s who ever piloted the TARDIS